Abstract

Undoubtedly, T. S. Eliot has been revered as a major canonical poet as well as a critical arbiter of modernist poetics in the history of South Korean English studies. Yet, his cultural capital has continued to decrease in South Korean academia, so that some South Korean English scholars have to ask themselves a Hamletesque question about whether to keep or not to keep Eliot’s representative work, “The Waste Land,” in the syllabus of English poetry. Thus, this article, looking at the vicissitude of Eliot’s fortune in South Korean English studies, attempts to diagnose the current decline of Anglo-American centered English studies and address the necessity for hyper-connecting global English studies.